Illuminations

by T. Kingfisher

Boredom started to settle over her again, like a dull beige cloud. Now it was even worse, because it was mixed with a feeling that if she were better or older or just somehow more, she would have something to do. It was bad enough being bored. Being bored and inadequate was nearly unbearable.

Uncle Alfonso smiled. “You put your heart into them. That’s what matters. Every illumination takes a piece of the painter’s heart, and that is why the magic works.” Rosa scowled. “Doesn’t that mean I’ll run out of heart if I draw too many?” ”Fortunately,” said Uncle Alfonso, “you are still quite young. Your heart is growing so fast that you cannot possibly run out. In fact, it is probably wise if you draw as much as possible to keep it from exploding.” She stuck her tongue out at him. “My heart isn’t going to explode!” ”Probably not,” said Uncle Alfonso, “but there is no sense in taking chances.”

That’s what the best illuminations do. Most of them are little tiny things, like keeping the milk from going bad, or keeping the mice out of the pantry, but they make people’s lives a little better. That’s the best that any of us can hope for.”

“Because,” said Grandmama dryly, “if you ask two Mandolinis how to do something, you will get five different answers.”

“Do you remember when I told you that a painting takes a little bit of your heart?” Uncle Alfonso asked. Rosa nodded. “Well, you are young and strong and your heart grows by leaps and bounds. But when you get older, it takes longer. Such a large illumination takes a large piece of your heart, and it does not grow back so easily. If you do too many, too quickly, you will find yourself with only a tired sliver left, and then you’re in trouble.” “Will you die?” whispered Rosa, horrified. Grandmama snorted. “No,” she said, “but you will lie around and mope and pick at your food for days, until your family is sick to death of it.”

“You must feed your heart,” said Uncle Alfonso. “With beautiful things and places you have never seen and books that bring you joy. Then your heart will grow back and you can paint again.

“Don’t underestimate the Scarling. It’s made of cunning. And wickedness. And…um…wood. Mostly wood. But also wickedness.”

“What does it look like?” asked Rosa, thinking of the mandrake that Uncle Marco had drawn on the tablecloth. “Like the essence of wickedness!” “Right, okay, but what does the essence of wickedness look like?” “Like a little brown carrot with legs,” said Payne. “And a disagreeable expression.”

Grandmama had always been very strict about this. A mural was one thing, that was art, but she said that once you started jotting your shopping list down on the wall, they were on the road to Degeneracy. (When she was younger, Rosa had believed that Degeneracy must be a place, apparently with a great deal of graffiti and unmade beds.)

“Bathrooms are important,” said Aunt Nadia vaguely. She seemed more interested in her coffee. “Bathrooms are the windows to the soul.” Rosa was fairly sure that bathrooms were nothing of the sort. Aunt Nadia often got a little weird when she was working on a painting, as if most of her brain was involved with art, and the bits that controlled talking were wandering around unsupervised.

“How is your painting going?” asked Rosa. “Glorious. Terrible. I don’t know. I’m a genius or an idiot. I won’t be sure until it’s done.” Rosa nodded. This was also perfectly normal. Aunt Nadia spent at least two-thirds of every painting convinced that she was the worst artist in the world and the other third convinced that she was best. This was slightly easier to deal with than Cousin Sergio, who believed that the painting was brilliant up until the moment it was finished, when he suddenly discovered that it was terrible and they had to stop him from setting the canvas on fire.

“Do not be reasonable at me,” said Grandmama. “I am not in the mood to be reasoned at.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was so upset—but of course you wouldn’t. Even when you were very small, you never ruined things like that. You were always trying to help.” Rosa started to cry again, out of sheer relief.

That’s one of the hardest parts of being an artist, you know—learning to be patient with yourself when you’re not as good as you want to be. You have to say, ‘I may not be very good today, but I’ll be better tomorrow, and in a year, I’ll be amazing!’

“Tybalt made some bad decisions,” he admitted grudgingly. “He was very smart and he knew it and he tended to think that made him right. Occasionally he made an enemy.”

“But I said something to my dad, and he said—look, we’re going to be taking commissions forever, right? And sometimes you’ll get one and I won’t, and I’ll get one and you won’t. Dad said I had to learn to deal with it and that’s just how it is sometimes. You can’t get mad at the other artists.” She scuffed her foot. “And I know he’s right. But sometimes I just say things when I’m mad and it’s mean and I know it’s mean and I don’t want to say them but I also sort of do, and I know it’s wrong and I’m sorry. I keep trying not to. I don’t want to be that sort of person. I don’t want people to have to keep forgiving me.” She squared her shoulders and looked Rosa in the eye. “But I was mean. Will you forgive me?”

I can barely cook in this mess and I won’t serve someone a meal with mouse droppings in it!” “Certainly not,” muttered Aunt Nadia, from her bay. “Mouse droppings are for family only.”

“A great artist must have great materials,” he said, when she goggled at the paint. “But I’m not a great artist, Uncle.” He smiled. “Well, great materials can’t hurt. If you give a beginner cheap paint that runs or discolors or breaks into gritty pieces, they will learn that paint is hard to use, and that is entirely the wrong lesson.”

“A small group of soldiers can succeed where an army might fail, Nadia. Can’t you just see us all lurking around a box with a string?” Aunt Nadia smirked into her coffee cup. “You make a valid point, I admit. Too many painters spoils an illumination.”

“Truly, we’re not a collaborative lot,” said Uncle Marco to Serena. “Sergio really is a genius, but it’s not something he can explain to other people, and Nadia has her own way of doing things. Alfonso and I will help each other fill in large bits, but he loves great vast landscapes and I love painting little creatures, like Walter.” “My parents work on each other’s paintings a lot,” said Serena. “And my brother and my six cousins all work together, too.” “Nothing wrong with that,” said Uncle Alfonso firmly. “You can do great things together. Look at the illuminations on the canal! But it requires a different sort of thinking.”

“He used his skills to make a tool, and the right tool made everything easier. Like using a knife to cut a tree to make an axe handle. Once you have the axe, it’s much easier to cut the next hundred trees.”

But Tybalt was single-minded when he worked, and once he learned a technique, he didn’t really care about it any more. He’d be obsessed with learning it, with making it better, and then he’d just abandon it as soon as he was done.” Uncle Marco snorted. “I don’t know anyone like that,” Sergio, who would dedicate a year to mastering a technique, and then drop it as soon as it no longer interested him, gave an embarrassed cough.

“He was a Mandolini, and I wish I could say that any of that surprises me, but we have always been easily fascinated and even more easily distracted. And occasionally too talented for our own good.”

“Spoons like to be with other spoons,” said Payne. “They feel more comfortable in a herd.”

“Boys!” muttered Serena. “That’s just what we don’t need.” “I thought you liked boys,” whispered Rosa. “To look at. Not to do important stuff.”

Rosa stared at the tabletop and hoped that no one else was going to apologize to her today. She was getting very tired of holding everyone’s apologies in her head.

“I feel terribly weak,” murmured Aunt Nadia. “As if the life was draining away from me…oh wait, it’s just that there’s no coffee.”

But apparently there was a difference between hoping to get a commission and refusing to give bandages to someone who’d been hurt. The studios might be rivals, but they went back and forth trading paint and canvas and—and—stuffed armadillos! Because they were all illuminators together. Because everybody knew that when you needed paint, you needed it right now. And someday you’d be the one who needed to borrow paint…

Cousin Sergio was not a very good sculptor, but he liked to do it sometimes as a change from painting. “Think differently!” he’d bark, hands in the clay. “Shake out cobwebs!”)

She wondered if a grown-up would understand. Grown-ups never seemed to get bored. Maybe they’d forgotten how boredom could twist around and become a horrible gray blanket that lay over everything until you were climbing the walls trying to find ways to keep yourself entertained. “Look,” she said, “you always say ‘You’ll understand when you’re older.’ But you’d understand if you were younger! How bored and angry can it get in two hundred years? The Scarling couldn’t go play outside! All it could do was sit there and get madder and madder and think of ways to get revenge!”

It was fast. Sergio’s power was like a hummingbird, moving at twice the speed of the people around him, a swift, fiery blaze. No wonder he talks so fast—and it’s hard for us to understand him sometimes! He jumps from one thing to the next so quickly because he sees all these connections and doesn’t understand why the rest of us can’t follow along.

His was a far steadier power than Cousin Sergio’s, as deep and slow as the bedrock that the city was built on. It anchored the illumination and gave it a solid place to stand. At the same time, images flicked through Rosa’s mind, too quick to follow—scenes of a long life lived gladly and well, an incredible depth of knowledge, and a love for his family that warmed her like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold day. His power grounded her, slowing the sudden hummingbird-race of Rosa’s heart, offering shelter from the terrible storm of magic around them.

He drew in the veins, half-leaves, half-beetle wings, and suddenly Rosa knew things about Uncle Marco that she had never suspected—how much his bad leg hurt him and how much he feared being a burden on his family, how he sought escape in paint, because in art, it did not matter if you had to walk with a cane or not. The energy that surged into her from her uncle was so determined that it was terrifying. It was a warrior spirit, hammered and forged like steel. “Why are you an artist?” demanded Rosa. “You should be leading armies!” Uncle Marco laughed. “I may have done something of the sort in my youth,”

Rosa began to fear that, far from not having enough power, the combined might of Studio Mandolini might overwhelm her. It was flowing through her, incredibly strong, the personalities of her family blending together into one great roar of love and strength and art. It threatened to sweep her away. She clung to the charcoal as if it were an anchor.

Rosa did not know what she had expected from Aunt Nadia—something prickly and spiky, perhaps—but what she found was that the prickliness was a narrow-armored shell over a bright flame. Hers was a soul that would gladly burn itself out in pursuit of art, and then give the art away at the end, because it was the act of creating that mattered, the act that made her feel alive.

More, she thought at the great illumination. More. Get up. Get up and fight for us. I order you— No. No, that was the wrong thing to say. You didn’t order your art to do something, you asked it. Sometimes you begged. And sometimes it didn’t work, but when it did, if you were lucky, there was that transcendent moment when everything flowed and you couldn’t put a brushstroke wrong, and all the Studio Mandolini was with Rosa and she reached out and whispered, “Please.”

Grandmama and Serena were all that stood between them and the mantis monster. They looked tiny and fragile and fierce.

Rosa was in a place beyond words. She no longer thought at her illumination, she simply felt at it, sending strength and love and the desire for the battle to end.

The magic changed. The wave that had swept through her for so long had been about art, and the love of art, the joy of paint spread on canvas and lines drawn on paper. Now it was the love of Rosa. She saw herself reflected in four sets of eyes, Marco and Alfonso and Sergio and Nadia, a mirror far kinder than any piece of glass. She saw her uncle’s delight in her curiosity and her cousin’s fierce desire to protect her from harm and her aunt’s sneaky glee in having another girl around the studio that she could lock eyes with and roll her eyes and go, “Men!”

“Besides,” said Aunt Nadia, stirring her coffee with a palette knife, “if you weren’t around, we might have silverware again, and I, for one, wouldn’t know how to act.”

“I’ve decided I’m going to be proud instead. After all, you can make living illuminations, which is amazing, and you’re my friend, so I must be at least a little amazing too, right?” This struck Rosa as extremely sensible,

She didn’t know what to say to make things better. Uncle Alfonso had told her that there wasn’t anything to say. “It’s easy when bad people die,” he told her. “And it’s not easy when good people die, but at least it’s straightforward, and you know exactly how you’re supposed to feel. But when someone who was good and bad dies, someone you loved, but who hurt you…then you don’t know how to feel at all. If you’re sad, it feels wrong, and if you’re not sad, that feels wrong too.” “That seems complicated,” said Rosa. “And hard.” “People are hard,” Uncle Alfonso agreed. “Grief is hard, too.”

The odd dates scattered through the manuscript are derived from the French Revolutionary Calendar, a very peculiar calendar created in the aftermath of the French Revolution, to remove all traces of mythology, Roman emperors, and other things deemed non-revolutionary. In our world, it didn’t last very long—I fear it’s not actually a very good calendar—but it’s delightful and rather absurd, full of things like “Turnip Day” and “Compost Day.” I loved all the imagery and was always looking for some piece of writing to use it. (You can still buy the French Revolutionary Calendar online, and never miss Turnip Day again!)